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Great-Grand-Dad In The News

A comment yesterday points to this story, of the discovery of fossilized squid ink, which they say is essentially identical in composition to the ink of modern cuttlefish.

“The whole machinery apparently has been locked in time and passed down through succeeding generations of cuttlefish. It’s a very optimized system for this animal and has been optimized for a long time.”

This may or may not be the same story I wrote about before–if it isn’t, it’s close enough. The hook last time, though, was that they actually reconstituted some of the ink, and used it to draw an illustration of the squid itself.

I have a small bottle of sepia inkWhich I use for particular writing.The feel of a quill-pen is special, I think,And I find the whole process exciting.

I read in the news, of an interesting find,Of a well-preserved cephalo-fossil(The paleontologists gladly remind,What we learn may be truly colossal!

See, soft-tissue fossils are rare, as a rule,So an ink-sac was quite unexpected—This cephalofind was the coolest of cool,As a rock that can still be dissected!)

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I was wondering why it was “belemnotheutis” instead of “belemnoteuthis” as I’d have expected. According to a commenter at the second link, it was misspelled by the original discoverer back in 1842 and is now enshrined in stone. So to speak.

Meanwhile, and utterly off-topic, the last episode of Sailor Twain is Friday. So many unanswered questions!